The wrecking ball is coming to Detroit to finally take care of Tiger Stadium and it will be a sad day for every baseball fan in Detroit. I can’t believe they’re finally going to demolish it. Tiger Stadium has been one of the long-standing “hot topics” of sports talk radio in Detroit since I entered the fray in ‘96 with people like Bill Dow leading the charge to save the stadium and Mike Ilitch proposing Comerica Park to make it obsolete. Even after Comerica had been built and the Tigers settled in there was much discussion about what to do with the Tiger Stadium. Shopping centers, condos, museum plans, restaurants and a last ditch effort by Ernie Harwell to save the stadium were among the many ideas proposed by some group or another. The next coming weeks the book will finally close on the old ballpark and I anticipate we’ll do another show or two (or three) taking calls from people conjuring up shared memories of the majesty of Tiger Stadium. It’s going to feel like a wake.

Tiger Stadium reminds me of my grandfather and for reasons that have nothing to do with baseball. I was extremely close to my grandfather and loved him dearly. He starting having many ailments and physical problems as he crept up in years. The kind we’ll all get if we’re fortunate enough to live a long, full life. His knees gave out, he couldn’t walk very well without help, his kidneys were shot and he was having heart problems when he was hospitalized to see if there was some way modern medicine could save him. The last time I visited him it was painfully obvious to me that he wasn’t going to be able to recover and my hopes of sitting with him one more time on his front porch on a sunny day would never materialize. He died the next day.

While the funeral and wake for my grandfather was extremely difficult for me, I took solace in the wonderful memories that his friends and family had of him. I’ll never have another sunny day with my grandfather or another twi-night doubleheader at Tiger Stadium, but I’ll always have some cherished memories.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Tigers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.